DAWN - Opinion; November 13, 2001

Published November 13, 2001

Fighting two wars

By Shahid Javed Burki


WHEN, on October 7, America launched air attacks on Afghanistan, there was some expectation that the first phase of the war against international terrorism could be brought to a speedy conclusion. According to this scenario, all the military assets belonging to the Taliban would be destroyed within a few days.

Dispirited, the warlords who had earlier been won over by the Taliban to their side would abandon their masters in droves. They would assemble under the tent of a new alliance that had the blessing of America and its partners. The new rulers of Afghanistan would eventually lead the Americans towards Osama bin Laden’s hideout in the mountains of Afghanistan. Bin Laden and his associates would be captured, dead or alive.

The armada of ships assembled by America off the shores of Pakistan and India would sail back home. The bases occupied by the US forces in Central Asia would be vacated as the new rulers consolidated their hold over Kabul and most major cities of Afghanistan. Having vanquished the Taliban and destroyed the command and control centres of Al Qaeda, the Americans would turn their attention to eliminating the presence of potential terrorists hiding in their own country and in Europe.

There was a reasonable expectation that this scenario would unfold without too many glitches. That, of course, did not happen. A month has passed and in spite of heavy bombing by the US, there have been no large-scale defections of the warlords and tribal chiefs supporting the Taliban. It appears that the war in Afghanistan will go on for a while. Nobody has defined the meaning of “a while”. The war’s duration will not be determined by the intensity of bombing, nor by the advance of the rag-tag troops of the Northern Alliance. It will be determined by politics and that, in turn, will be influenced by economics.

Even if a new alliance is finally configured to replace the Taliban in Kabul, its journey to Afghanistan’s capital will not be easy. Given the history of the country, alliances will be made and come apart with maddening frequency. There will be considerable chaos and confusion all along our 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan for many years. Some of this will necessarily spill over into Pakistan.

It is not difficult to see why neither of these two scenarios — a quick end to the conflict or a long drawn out struggle in Afghanistan — is good for Pakistan. In the case of the first, a quick American victory would have resulted in an equally rapid loss of interest on the part of Washington in the affairs of Central and South Asia. The Americans have been loudly protesting that that would not be the case this time. They say they have learnt a lesson from the past. They now realize that they should have stayed engaged and not put severe economic and military sanctions on Pakistan the moment the Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. They are very honest in suggesting that this time around they are determined to clean up the mess after the show has left the town. And, I am sure, all these protestations are meant in earnest.

Nonetheless, nations behave differently during times of crisis and in periods of calm. There is nothing wrong in putting national interest above other interests. It is in America’s national interest at this point to promise long-term involvement in and around Afghanistan even after the conflict is over. Without such a promise a coalition could not have been assembled. It is also in America’s national interest to worry about the longer-term impact of the actions being taken. There is a growing realization that in many ways Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network are the product of the two wars in Afghanistan — the war fought to evict the Soviet Union from Afghanistan and the war fought later by the Taliban to establish their sway over Afghanistan. But once the conflict is over, it is natural for the Americans to reassess their situation and such a re-evaluation may not result in Central and South Asia being given a very high priority on their agenda.

In the case of the second scenario — an unending conflict in Afghanistan — Pakistan will necessarily pay a heavy price in terms of its economic, social and political development. It is hard to predict how the people of Pakistan — not only the fundamentalist Islamists but also the usually silent majority — will respond if the war drags on for months and years. It is even more difficult to assess the economic cost of a continuing conflict. Nonetheless, one thing is certain. If the war continues for many months, Pakistan will not be able to attract investments — both foreign and domestic — into the economy. Without a lot of new investment the economy will continue to stagnate. It is right for President Pervez Musharraf, therefore, to press the Americans to move expeditiously on the battlefield.

What Pakistan should also be pressing for is the need to fight two wars simultaneously — on the battlefield and in the cities, towns and villages on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border. The other war must involve economic development, social improvement and nation-building in both Afghanistan and in the Pakistani areas along the border. The Americans may not be very enthusiastic to get so deeply involved in a part of the world they do not fully understand. It is in Pakistan’s interest to press them into service and to ensure that the support on offer to us at this time is not limited to a reduction in our burden of debt and a modest access to the American and European markets for our products. The involvement must go much deeper than that. What Pakistan and its allies should be waging is a war on hunger, illiteracy and poverty and it should be fought on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Let us first see where Afghanistan is today. In 1979, before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, 80 per cent of the country’s population lived on the land. Irrigation was vital for the country where 85 per cent of water comes from the mountains of the Hindukush in the north. But the irrigation system was seriously damaged. Irrigated land has declined by at least two- thirds. And then nature added to the country’s woes. Over the last two years, Afghanistan has suffered its worst drought for a century. As a result of these unhappy developments, agricultural output fell by 70 per cent resulting in further impoverishment of an already poor country.

For a country not inclined towards modernization, the arrival of the Taliban dealt a severe blow to the sector of education. Women were barred from attending school and boys were taught little more than the Quran. Consequently, today Afghanistan’s literacy rates are the lowest in the world: 47 per cent for men and a miserable 15 per cent for women.

Complicating all this is the developing situation with respect to refugees — people moving within the country or moving across the border into neighbouring lands. Current estimates are that one-fifth to one-fourth of the entire population — some five to six million people — may have moved over the next several months, leaving their homes unattended and their land untended. If that happens, this will be the largest movement of people since the refugee crisis following the partition of British India in 1947 when 14 million crossed the newly drawn border.

To reverse these disastrous economic and social trends will require more than just the commitment of financial resources. It will need the creation of an institutional infrastructure in a country that has suffered total destruction. To rebuild agriculture and irrigation will need interventions by a non-existent public sector and the creation of a credit and marketing system that can reach the small farmer. To recreate the educational system will need collaboration between the public and private sectors. New textbooks will have to be written. Teachers will have to be trained to instruct in a number of languages. Curricula will have to be prepared to improve the skills of the people. A system of examination will have to be created. The cost of doing all this will be manageable.

A recent study estimates that a village school would cost about $10,000 to build and $6,000 a year to run. For $100 million of capital cost and $60 million of recurrent costs, 10,000 schools providing education to a million children could be established. The task, therefore, involves a managerial rather than a financial challenge.

Similar tasks await the Pakistani state and the donor community on the Pakistani side of the border — in the provinces of Balochistan and the North-west Frontier. The only major difference is that the state functions to some extent in this part of the country. Nonetheless, the educational system was surrendered by the state to the non-government organizations. Many of these NGOs set up madrassahs that provided little education. They only teach the Koran and some of them instruct their students in martial arts in order to prepare them for various freedom struggles all across the globe. These madrassahs also produced the Taliban. They are also probably responsible for the jihadis who have reportedly crossed the Pakistani border and have gone to the other side to fight the Americans.

The first task before the Pakistani state, therefore, is to recapture the educational system from the fundamentalist NGOs and begin to provide serious and functional education to the millions of young people who are going without it at this time.

The Pakistani state, working in close collaboration with the community of donors, should adopt a radical approach towards education on its side of the border with Afghanistan. An entirely new educational system should be created to serve not only the young people of the northern areas but also the refugees who have already arrived in the country. We should dispense with a separate approach towards the two communities we must reach — the refugees and the local people. Both should be brought into the same system. Both should follow the same curriculum. They should learn from the same textbooks and teachers. After all, these people belong mostly to the same tribes. There is little point in separating them.

Along with education must come opportunities for the millions of unemployed youth to engage in productive work. Given the current state of the Pakistani economy, it will take quite a while before jobs can be created in agriculture, manufacturing, and various kinds of services. Until that happens, the government should launch massive public works programmes in the cities, towns and villages on the Pakistani side of the border. The aim of these programmes should be to create basic infrastructure for the economy and to improve a rapidly degrading environment. Roads, schools and clinics can be built, irrigation channels cleared and repaired, trees planted. There is plenty to do in this devastated land and the unemployed youth of the country should be put to work immediately. The two wars — the military and the one fighting illiteracy, hunger and unemployment — must be pursued simultaneously.

Of crusaders and jihadis

By Asad Durrani


UNTIL recently, George W Bush did not know much about the Crusades. All the same he proclaimed one, a crusade, to fight terrorism. But isn’t that what we all do, Christians and Muslims, when desperately in pursuit of seemingly impossible objectives: vow to wage crusades or jihads? We have done that so often, so many of our desires being hopelessly out of reach, that we got it all mixed up.

The “holy war”, first pronounced by the Christians during the crusades, has now become a jihadi concept. Calling a crusade thus always raised less rumpus than the cries for Jihad. No more.

The American president might still have gotten away with it, except that in his cross wires he only saw turbans. He was therefore well advised to rechristen his war, but not well enough. He would have done one better by declaring a jihad. The Muslim support that he so badly needed, at least in the present phase, we could then have offered without much fuss. More important, if anyone, now only a non-Muslim can call a jihad. Much before the junior Bush mangled over the crusades, Islamic jihad had become synonymous with terrorism. The Muslims are now better served if they abstain from its use, semantically that is, even when waging jihad in its most sublime form: against evils within. So much has the world changed for the jihadis, and for the crusaders.

President Bush and his camp followers have often held that their ongoing war, including the military action in Afghanistan, was not against Islam or its adherents. It may not be, but a large number of believers believe otherwise. And they have a long list of grievances — a longer one of banned organizations and frozen assets, and an open-ended roll of suspected terrorists — to fall back upon. The longest is the list of Muslims and their well wishers who repeat ad nauseum that Islam was a religion of peace: with little effect, the mere fact that they have to say it so often. In the minds, in the hearts, and perhaps also in the souls, of many in the East and in the West, the Islamic faith is very much at the core of the current conflict.

With so many of its declared goals seemingly so elusive, it is not very clear what the present war on Afghanistan is all about. The other day, General Wesley Clark, the former supreme commander of NATO, gave us a worthwhile objective: to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic world. One wishes the other discussant, our very able one time CGS, General Farrukh Khan, never so stiff or stuffed as on that day, had revealed to this veteran of the Kosovo war that that aim, if not already lost, the Americans were fast losing. Maybe the governments cannot fight such transcendental wars. Maybe they can only react to, or manage, crises. For the US, the anger at home and the ‘Wild West ways’ seem to have been the overriding thought. Too bad the good guys cannot get out of the way.

A wise man from the desert, whose intellect one has come to admire, gave me some good advice. If one did not wish to be trampled by a raging bull, one should not come in its way. And if the idea was to take it by the horns, the hold from its back had a better chance. (Thank Allah, it is not a tiger we have to ride.) We did well by not coming in the way. And with some rodeo experience of our own, we should be able to stay up longer, because that is what we have to do: stay up and guide the bull before it did too much damage, also to itself.

What do we do, the rest of us, to help our government stay on top? To express genuine concerns, one may criticize or protest. These are the times to line up behind the government — to give and gain confidence, not to spread gloom and panic. These are the times for nation building. If the crisis soon ends, we can show the way to another people, the Afghans, desperately in need of nation building. Even if it lasted a little longer, we can suffer it a bit better.

Those who appear so distraught can do no better than share with the distressed Afghans their sorrow and plight. And those straining at the leash to fight alongside them might carry some extra food, what the Afghans need more than additional moving targets. Those who cannot do either are welcome to join another front. More jihadis and crusaders are coming together to prevent the ultimate clash. It will be a long haul, to be fought on many fronts. That is one thing that the US president got right.

The writer, a retired lieutenant general of the Pakistan Army, is ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

It was America’s mistake

By Fred Hiatt


GEORGE W. Bush has set a lofty goal for the United States in Afghanistan and beyond. But recent US history suggests that the toughest challenge may come after the fighting, especially if America wins. The United States has prevailed in a number of conflicts during the past two decades, either directly or through proxies. It has expended considerable treasure and anguish and, in some cases, many lives.

Yet in each case it has walked away or been tempted to walk away from its success, squandering the gains that it might have reaped. This time it can’t afford to lose interest.

The United states helped train and equip Afghan and Arab fighters to oppose the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Once they prevailed and the Soviet Union withdrew, some of those fighters, including Osama bin Laden, turned their sights on the world’s other superpower.

Still, there is a fair case to be made that America’s abandoning of Afghanistan and Pakistan once the war ended was a mistake. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was a victory for freedom, but once it ended Americans drifted off, leaving the Afghan people wretchedly poor and the Pakistanis with a mess on their hands — refugees, guns, drugs, Islamic extremists. Out of that stew came civil war and, eventually, Taliban control.

In the 1980s, Central America preoccupied US foreign policy and domestic politics. By 1990, when Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinistas were turned out of office in democratic elections, US policy had succeeded; the Central American battlegrounds were poor but free and democratic. A decade later they are still poor, and the United States hardly seems to care.

Out of Nicaragua’s misery, hunger and corruption, the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega is considered likely to return to power in an election on Nov. 4.

The United States won a real war against Iraq in 1991, and no one could accuse it of deserting the region afterward. US forces remain in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, enforcing a no-flight zone over part of Iraq and dropping occasional bombs on Iraqi radars and anti-aircraft weapons. But throughout the 1990s, as Saddam Hussein recovered lost ground and prestige, the Clinton administration could not find the will to push back with sufficient strength.

Iraq has expelled UN weapons inspectors, evaded sanctions and stoked the Palestinian uprising, and each time the United States has fallen back and regrouped, sometimes proclaiming victory in defeat.

The Bush administration, at least until Sept. 11, seemed equally ambivalent about consolidating America’s victories.

In Kosovo in 1999 a US-led NATO air campaign forced Serbia to give up on a brutal campaign of forced expulsions and killing of civilians. Eventually, US policy helped bring democracy to Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic to trial in The Hague. But during the presidential campaign Mr Bush seemed eager to pull US peacekeepers out of Kosovo.

Once in office, he was reluctant to devote minimal resources to bringing stability to Macedonia, where civil war threatened all the gains in neighbouring Kosovo.

Now he says he has found his “mission,” and it lies in large part overseas. “The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time and the great hope of every time, now depends on us,” he said in his recent address to Congress.

That sweeping commitment is likely to find its first expression in Afghanistan. But the events of recent years have shown that no area of the world is entirely outside US interests.

The United states cannot afford to take its victories for granted — not its cold war victories in Eastern Europe, not the halting advance of democracy in East and Southeast Asia and not, if it comes, a second victory in as many decades in Afghanistan. —The Washington Post

History repeating itself? : ALL OVER THE PLACE

By Omar Kureishi


DEMOCRACY works when things are going well. It’s a fair-weather political system. At the slightest hint of danger, internal or external, inroads begin to be made on fundamental rights and in the interests of national security, which covers a multitude of sins, democracy becomes selective.

The first target is the media and though the management of news is never acknowledged and the profane word ‘censorship’ never used, it is a given that all the news that’s fit to print or air is the official version. By definition, the official version accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative.

It makes sense that civilian casualty figures in Afghanistan should be played down, otherwise the noble intent of the War Against Terrorism would become to seem like just another war. Worse, it may begin to resemble Vietnam. Someone in the Pentagon must be keeping count of the tonnage of bombs already dropped on Afghanistan and the types of bombs. Napalm has not yet been used but the cluster-bomb has.

In his book Our War, David Harris gives a chilling description of the cluster or the Plastic Fragmentation Bomb and the philosophy behind its use. He writes: “As the massive use of airpower rapidly became a central tenet of American strategy in Vietnam, our military planners had few enemy industrial or war mobilization centres to target, so the target became the population itself. The issue was how to maximize the efficiency of that effort and create the most significant possible drag on the enemy’s resources. That led to a study concluding that every enemy killed in the bombardment would require the attention of one-and-a-half others in the immediate aftermath of the attack. The same enemy seriously wounded would require the attention of five.

“That led to a widespread use of the fragmentation bomb about the size of a guava, made of steel, stuffed with explosives, and dropped by the hundreds in long canisters that opened up during their descent, spreading smaller bombs over a wide range. The smaller bombs were set to trigger at about ten feet off the ground, exploding into thousands of flying razor-sharp metal fragments, angled to reach those hiding in holes as well as those above ground. The result was an increasing number of wounded, who would each require the efforts of five people to help rather than one-and-a half.

“Then some bright young boy in the Pentagon added a last detail to the package: Why not manufacture the smaller bombs out of plastic? That way the wounds would not only be serious and plentiful but also relatively untreatable since the fragments that would lodge in the wounded could not be located with any X-ray machine.”

Now we learn that the largest bomb in the US inventory, 15,000 pounds, has been used. It is called the ‘daisy-cutter’ but it cuts more than daisies. The main purpose of the war is being deflected. Now, more than ever, there is a need for a media that can tell the coalition that the battle for hearts and minds is being lost. Both the United States and the Taliban are dishing out propaganda which is a dangerous sign that the war is setting into a pattern.

But worse is the treatment being meted out to American citizens of Arab descent and in which Pakistanis are also being lumped. In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon a certain amount of rage and irrational behaviour could have been excused.

But there has been plenty of time since then to soothe frayed nerves and bring back a measure of calmness. After all, the bombing of a government building by Timothy McVeigh did not lead to all rednecks being profiled and put under surveillance and abused and insulted on the streets. Those of us who watch the award-winning television series NYPD Blue have a pretty good idea of what happens to suspects in a police station and the sadism of the detectives who are meant to be the good guys!

I can imagine the plight of young Arab and Pakistanis who are hauled up and grilled, I can imagine the plight of young Arab and Pakistanis who are hauled up and grilled, I can imagine how they can be left traumatized. This is a clear violation of their rights and it makes a mockery of democracy.

What sets democracy apart from other systems is the ingrained tolerance and an unwavering respect for the law. To claim that exceptional times require exceptional measures is to deny the durability of democracy, its strength, its resilience. Democracy is not a house of cards that is blown away by a gust of wind, nor is the American Constitution a scrap of paper that can be torn up. The Americans are keen to spread the gospel of democracy all over the world. But to do so, they must lead by example, from the front. To stereotype or profile people on the basis of race, ethnicity is a negation of democracy and smacks of fascism. It is this message that should reach out to the people who are targeting American citizens of Arab origin and who are doing so because they consider themselves to be patriotic. On the contrary, it is a defilement of the American way of life. There seems to be something wrong when, in order to defeat an enemy, you become like him.

The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were horrific acts carried out by terrorists. They were widely condemned. But is bombing Afghanistan into the stone-age the right response? The United Nations estimates that the 100,000 children will die of starvation this winter. This is over and above those who would have died in any case, because a humanitarian disaster was looming even before the air strikes. Surely, these children are not terrorists.

But there’s a good chance that they will become, those who can escape the starvation. The original objective was a war against terrorism. It seems to have got lost and for the time being, it has become a war against Afghanistan. A case of history repeating itself, keeping Vietnam in mind.

Dubious legality of Afghan bombing

By Dr Aziz Kurta


IN THE present gung-ho atmosphere of sustained aerial and ground attacks on Afghanistan by the United States-led coalition it may seem churlish and even pointless to raise legal objections to this openly declared war on an almost defenceless and derelict country and its population.

But the US as a victim of the horrendous attacks on September 11 has on this occasion, as well as in previous military engagements, sought to justify its actions on the basis of international law and well recognized legal precepts. This is particularly due to the fact that the United States has itself frequently initiated and signed various international legal declarations and treaties concerning the prohibitions on international hostilities.

Thus, for instance, the ground breaking Kellogg-Briand Treaty of 1928, about which the then US secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, commented in 1932: “War between nations was renounced by the signatories (including the US and Britain) of that Treaty. This means that it has become throughout practically the entire world... an illegal thing. Hereafter when nations engage in armed conflict... we denounce them as law breakers.”

Although the declarations of that treaty remain entirely valid even today, there have nevertheless been even more far-reaching legal prohibitions on resort to hostilities Thus it has now been universally recognized, including in the UN Charter, that resort to hostilities across international frontiers is totally prohibited except within certain very limited parameters of Article 51 of the Charter which allows such actions in self-defence, whether, individual or collective, in response to “an armed attack.”

Much has been written and discussed as to the exact meaning of “an armed attack” which could justify a hostile military response from the victim but in 1986 a fairly definitive clarification was issued by the International Court of Justice itself in the Hague. The case in which it did so was filed by Nicaragua and the defendant was none other than the United States. As may be expected, the US furiously objected to the World Court’s jurisdiction to hear Nicaragua’s complaint about military attacks against it, but the court held by 15 votes to 1 (American judge Schwebel dissenting) that it did have jurisdiction to entertain the case.

The relevance of the Nicaragua case today lies not only in the fact that United States was involved in it but that similar legal arguments were being raised against those being propounded in defence of the hostilities against Afghanistan. In particular, the court held in its final judgment on the merits that:

“Whether self-defence be individual or collective, it can only be exercised in response to an ‘armed attack’. In view of the court, this is to be understood as meaning not merely action by regular armed forces across an international frontier but also the sending by a state of armed bands on to the territory of another state if such an operation,because of its scale and extent, would have been classified as an armed attack had it been carried out by regular armed forces.”

Although international law, especially since the Nuremberg trials of 1945, fixes certain responsibilities on individuals also, it has never been challenged that an “armed attack” under article 51 requires that it be mounted by a state.

In the light of the authoritative World Court definition it should be fairly clear, especially to the US as a litigant, that the actions of some 18 terrorists of disparate Arab national origins carrying sets of box cutters who commit kamikaze attacks against a state and its population cannot be said to have committed an “armed attack” and nor attributed to a particular state (like Afghanistan) as required by Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Although the Security Council unanimously passed the Resolution No. 1373 on September 28 condemning the terrorists attacks of September 11 and “reaffirmed the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence as recognized by the UN Charter”, it did not categorize the terrorist action of September 11 as an “armed attack”, nor did it in any way authorize military action against Afghanistan. In fact, there is no reference at all in that resolution to Afghanistan or the Taliban or to Osama bin Laden. No wonder, no proof or evidence of any sort was produced in the Security Council against Afghanistan.

Even if there was a legitimate exercise of self-defence there would still be the important legal requirement to take “proportionate” rather than excessive action and to protect the civilian population because acts of revenge against a state for its unproven crime are utterly illegal.

The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has himself stated that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” but the FBI has offered its definition of terrorism as constituting “violent acts... intended to intimidate or coerce civilian population, influence the policy of a government or affect the conduct of a government”. Objective as this definition may appear to be at first, on reflection it would also seem to cover a number of covert CIA-funded operations against Latin American countries like Guatemala, Colombia and Nicaragua as well as movements for self-determination of subjugated people whose right to freedom is fully recognized in the UN Charter.

In any criticism of the conduct of the current war against terrorism, one must never forget that the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon where a massive crime against humanity in a technical legal sense and that those involved must be punished. However, acknowledging this fact by no means amount to endorsing the use of unlimited force which is being done in the present case on very dubious legal grounds.

The true remedy is to search out and punish the real perpetrators and their associates but not by outright military invasion of weak and impoverished country like Afghanistan. Indeed, Article 2 (3) of Security Council Resolution 1373 requires that steps be taken “to ensure that the perpetrators of terrorist acts be brought to justice”, rather than being ‘smoked out’ or ‘captured dead or alive’ which seems to be the purpose of the American-led offensive against Afghanistan.

The United States is also relying on the formula of “an attack on one is an attack on all” under a NATO accord which conveniently avoids the need to prove an “armed attack” by an allegedly aggressor state before the NATO coalition can resort to defensive or punitive action, although it is specifically provided for in the UN Charter that all such actions are subject to the provisions of the Charter.

To return to the precedent of the Nicaragua case decided by the World Court in 1986, it held the US guilty of aggression and judicially criticized it as follows: a) It rejected by 12 votes to 3 the plea of collective self-defence taken by the US in justification of its military activities against Nicaragua; b) It decided “that the United States... by supporting and aiding military activities against Nicaragua.... was in breach of its obligation under international law not to intervene in the affairs of another state”; c) That the US must pay compensation to Nicaragua.

In a might-is-right situation where the sole superpower is calling all the shots and, at the same time, hiding behind one legal formulation or another to justify its action against Afghanistan, it may seem pointless trying to reason with Washington and its coalition allies.

The bomb-and-butter policy of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan may seem incongruous if not downright hypocritical to many but must be truly puzzling to the Afghan people who may be collecting yellow packets full of biscuits, strawberry jam, etc. but many of whom have no homes to take these goodies to because they have been bombed to rubble by the very same benefactors.

Many people in Pakistan as elsewhere may genuinely abhor the Taliban regime for its cruel and retrograde policies, but one must nevertheless raise one’s voice against the relentless bombing of Afghanistan and the killing of innocent civilians. The action is morally and legally as reprehensible as the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

Market panic

THE celebrated maestro of the Fed, Alan Greenspan, was away in Switzerland on that terrible Tuesday when the twin towers collapsed around Wall Street. He didn’t return to Washington until late Wednesday. The secretary of the Treasury, Paul O’Neill, was traveling in Japan.

So it fell to Roger W. Ferguson Jr, a quiet, 49-year-old lawyer with a doctorate in economics, to hold the financial system together. And in those first several days after the crisis, that wasn’t a sure thing. The attack had devastated Wall Street, and a misstep by the Fed could have brought the delicately balanced international payments system crashing down. The Fed, like most Washington institutions, was evacuated Tuesday morning because of fears it would be bombed. —The Washington Post.

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